1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to software tools for assisting software developers and users in the task of monitoring and analyzing the execution of computer programs, such as during the troubleshooting process.
2. Description of the Related Art
The software industry faces a challenge in fighting malfunctions (colloquially known as “bugs”) that occur in the released versions of commercial software. Such malfunctions cause serious problems both for customers and vendors. It is often difficult to identify the particular situation, or situations, that leads to the malfunction and this adds to the difficulty of finding the root-cause of the malfunction in the application code or coding environment. The problem is especially difficult if it appears only at a remote customer site and is not reproducible in the development and testing environments. Remote software troubleshooting based on run-time execution tracing of applications in production environments is often used to identify and diagnose such malfunctions. This approach provides insight into the running application and allows gathering of execution traces that record function calls, variables, source lines and other important information. However, analysis of program execution traces and understanding of the root-cause of a program error is a tedious and time-consuming task. The execution trace log can contain thousands of function calls and other entries corresponding to events that happened just before the malfunction.